History of the United States I / Unit 12 USH1 1710 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Agassiz and Polygenism
The idea
The North produced defenders of slavery too. Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, popularised polygenism, the claim that human races originated separately and that Black people constituted a wholly separate race. The idea gained ground in the eighteen fifties with the publication of Types of Mankind by George Gliddon and Josiah Nott in eighteen fifty-four.
In practice
One advocate placing Black people between the Greeks and chimpanzees on an evolutionary scale.
Where people slip
The anchor says polygenism codified racism and gave notions of Black inferiority scientific credibility. Note where it came from. Scientific racism in this period was Harvard's as much as the plantation's, and an entry locating racism solely in the South misstates the anchor and leaves students unable to explain the North's own record. This matters again in Unit 16, where northern support for Reconstruction collapses.
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